Teaching Primary Sources—Teacher Training Assignment

Getting to Know Lincoln and Nevada through Primary Sources

Assignment Description

Participants will work in groups of three to work with a prepared inquiry question relating to Abraham Lincoln or 19th century Nevada. They will identify primary sources available on the Library of Congress website to answer their inquiry question. These primary sources will then be made available to students in the form of a primary source sets accompanying the inquiry question on this blog. For examples, teachers are encouraged to view Exploring Primary Sources Sets published by Edupress.

Each group will create a blog entry including the following items:

• Links to a collection of at least four artifacts including at least one textual and one pictorial artifact
• Information for each artifact
• An artifact description
• Content of artifact
• Author's/Creator's point of view
• Context of artifact (e.g., timing, politics, social climate)
• Student questions for engaging students in higher level thinking about the artifact
• Student suggestions for imaginative thinking (e.g., "What would happen if...?," "Would it be better if...?") and suggested strategies for answering the questions (e.g., create a timeline)